An improved medium access control protocol for real-time applications in WLANs and its firmware development

The IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), commonly known as Wi-Fi, has emerged as a popular internet access technology and researchers are continuously working on improvement of the quality of service (QoS) in WLAN by proposing new and efficient schemes. Voice and video over Internet Protocol (VVoIP) applications are becoming very popular in Wi-Fi enabled portable/handheld devices because of recent technological advancements and lower service costs. Different from normal voice and video streaming, these applications demand symmetric throughput for the upstream and downstream. Existing Wi-Fi standards are optimised for generic internet applications and fail to provide symmetric throughput due to traffic bottleneck at access points. Performance analysis and benchmarking is an integral part of WLAN research, and in the majority of the cases, this is done through computer simulation using popular network simulators such as Network Simulator ff 2 (NS-2) or OPNET. While computer simulation is an excellent approach for saving time and money, results generated from computer simulations do not always match practical observations. This is why, for proper assessment of the merits of a proposed system in WLAN, a trial on a practical hardware platform is highly recommended and is often a requirement. In this thesis work, with a view to address the abovementioned challenges for facilitating VoIP and VVoIP services over Wi-Fi, two key contributions are made: i) formulating a suitable medium access control (MAC) protocol to address symmetric traffic scenario and ii) firmware development of this newly devised MAC protocol for real WLAN hardware. The proposed solution shows signifocant improvements over existing standards by supporting higher number of stations with strict QoS criteria. The proposed hardware platform is available off-the-shelf in the market and is a cost effective way of generating and evaluating performance results on a hardware system

Wireless Communications Networking: and An Overview

This paper presents an overview of wireless local-area networks (LANs) and wireless personal area networks (PANs), with emphasis on the two most popular standards: IEEE 802.1 1, and Bluetooth. While there are many such surveys in the current literature and online, we attempt here to present wireless LANs and PANS in a unified fashion as a viable alternative to wired LANs, while stressing the remaining challenges and limitations

Improved multi-point communication for data and voice over IEEE 802.11b

There is a growing demand for faster, improved data and voice services in rural areas without modern telecom infrastructure. A wireless network is often the only feasible solution for providing network access in this environment, due to the sparse populations and difficult natural conditions. A system solution that incorporates the Multipoint Communication System (MCS) algorithm created by TRLabs into the available IEEE 802.11b Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) devices was proposed and studied in this thesis. It combines the advantages of both systems, that is, the MCS’ capability of integrating Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and data services and the IEEE 802.11b standard, currently the most widely used in WLAN products. A system test bed was set up inside Network Simulator-2 (NS-2). The data and VoIP performance was tested. Modifications to the original MCS algorithm to improve system performance were made throughout this thesis. In a constant rate radio channel, data performance (throughput and transmission efficiency) was measured using the original MCS algorithm, which was comparable to the standard Distribution Coordination Function (DCF) operation of IEEE 802.11b when both were simulated at similar conditions. On an 802.11b platform, the Automatic Rate Fallback (ARF) feature was incorporated into the original MCS algorithm. However, when clients with different data rates were present in the same channel, all the clients involved received unacceptably low and equal data throughput, dragged down by the low rate clients. A modified MCS data polling algorithm was proposed with the capability of repeated polling, which eliminated the negative effect of low rate clients in a multi-rate channel. In addition, the original MCS algorithm was modified to be more efficient in the voice polling process. The voice performance and data throughput were tested at various conditions. However, the one-by-one polling still resulted in very low voice transmission efficiency. The time wasted became more severe with increasing relay distance and channel rate (only 8.5% in an 11 Mbps channel at 30 km). A new voice handling process similar to Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) mode was implemented and simulated. Its voice efficiency can be kept at 25% at any setting of relay distance and channel rate. Data transmission in the same channel can also benefit from using the new voice scheme. The normalized saturation throughput could be improved by 13.5% if there were 40 voice clients involved in an 11 Mbps channel at the relay distance of 15 km, compared to the original MCS algorithm. More improvement in voice efficiency, voice capacity, and data throughput can be achieved at longer relay distance, or with more voice calls set up

Performance Evaluation Methods to Study IEEE 802.11 Broadband Wireless Networks under the PCF Mode

Non

THE INFLUENCE OF MAC BUFFER ON THE CONTENTION-BASED ACCESS SCHEME WITH BURSTING OPTION FOR IEEE 802.11E WIRELESS NETWORKS

Wireless LANs are increasingly being used for inelastic applications. Currently, there is little support for quality of service in the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol, and IEEE task group E has defined the 802.11e MAC extension. Enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) is a contention-based scheme of the 802.11e standard. To allow a station to transmit more than one frame from a single contention, an optional feature known as controlled frame-bursting (CFB) is introduced in the standard. In this paper, we initially performed an average analysis to determine a suitable burst duration limit. Then, a detailed evaluation and comparison of the EDCA protocol with the CFB option is carried out through simulation to quantify its performance gain. The impact of the MAC transmit buffer size is also incorporated. Accordingly, we have proposed a suitable approach to guide the configuration of the burst duration limit. It is demonstrated that an optimized CFB configuration allows the MAC protocol to achieve 30% more capacity than the basic EDCA scheme

Role of Wireless technology in mobile augmented reality system (MARS)

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Energy-efficient wireless communication

In this chapter we present an energy-efficient highly adaptive network interface architecture and a novel data link layer protocol for wireless networks that provides Quality of Service (QoS) support for diverse traffic types. Due to the dynamic nature of wireless networks, adaptations in bandwidth scheduling and error control are necessary to achieve energy efficiency and an acceptable quality of service. In our approach we apply adaptability through all layers of the protocol stack, and provide feedback to the applications. In this way the applications can adapt the data streams, and the network protocols can adapt the communication parameters